Helping people sell stuff since 1999

February 15, 2010

Looking for the Facebook login?

A common mistake that people make when trying to
design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity
of complete fools.

Douglas Adams

Tell me, does the site above look like Facebook? No it doesn't. But a couple of days ago, it rose to the top of the Google search rankings for the phrase "facebook login". As a result, all those people who use Google rather than type addresses into the address bar (quite a lot of people) ended up logging into ReadWriteWeb instead of Facebook, despite the fact that it is a completely different website that looks completely different and talks about completely different things, but happened to have a facebook logo in the blog post.

EXCUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSE ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY NOT JUST LEAVE IT ALONE!!!!!!!!!!!1111

All I want to do is log in, this sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

All these people were completely defeated. Easy to laugh, and genius funny, but instructive, however these are the people who we design for. Next time someone talks about user centred design, remember these are the users.